On Monday we premiered Big Scary’s debut album ‘Vacation”. Today, frontman Tom Iansek explains how Beethoven, guerrilla vandalism and book borrowing with ulterior motives influenced the record.
“Gladiator”: We wrote this song at the start of the year, it came together so easily and we knew straight up that it was going to really help bond the album together. Lyrically, I was trying to look at the idea of growing up but not necessarily improving as a person, something which has been on my mind more and more, particularly now that we’re devoting more time to our music, and less to regular everyday stuff.
Leaving Home: This is the oldest song of ours on the album. I wrote it just before I went traveling overseas for the first time about five years ago. It was the first time I was going to be leaving the security of the parental ‘nest’ and I was in love, it was a very exciting time. I was reluctant to throw it back into the mix for the album but once we threw a pumping hip-hop beat and crazy synth into the mix I was all for it.
“Mixtape”: Clearly the most ‘pop’ moment on the album, this song was a bit of fun. I wrote the lyrics on a friend’s behalf (not disclosing who sorry) who hooked up with someone for a bit of harmless fun but lost interest very quickly when this someone (not my friend) started getting a bit creepy and weird and wasn’t very good at reading my friend’s displays of disinterest. I naturally found the whole thing very funny and decided that it should become lyrics for this song.
“Purple”: A friend of a friend hates advertising. Giant billboards particularly grind this person’s gears. So he takes the money he gets from Centrelink, spends it on paint and paints over them in block colour. He did this for some time without raising much suspicion. Apparently one of his best jobs was five billboards all at once in purple. The police eventually figured out who it was and went round to question him. He confessed on the spot, and in fact continued to confess after each paint job and subsequent questioning. His honesty and lack of remorse apparently earned him some jail time. I just couldn’t help be drawn to this strange hero’s cause.
“Child In A Tree”: The original version of this song was very different to this current one. The original was more of a duet with the first half all slow jazzy chords à la Jeff Buckley’s Corpus Christi Carol. The song made no sense at all to our producer Sean Cook. I liked it how it was but thought we should be good sports about it and give it a go, and this version is more or less what we came up with. Unfortunately I don’t think this end version still made much sense to our poor producer.
“Bad Friends”: After a show in Hobart we missed our flight home to Melbourne the next day, due to sheer stupidity and perhaps also being quite hungover. I was meant to be playing at one of my best friend’s wedding that day which I missed. This event somewhat confirmed my belief that in chasing our dream (as musicians) there were personal costs involved. So this song looks at what you leave behind when you orientate your life around chasing your dream or pursuing your art.
“Got It, Lost It”: Written in the same week as Gladiator, this song is all about the ambience. People who aren’t in the right mood are not going to get this song at all. We really love the space in this track. It took a few mixes to really get it right.
Falling Away: This is the only pre-released song that made it on the album. We were hesitant to redo stuff that we had already released but this song really seemed to connect with our listeners and also fit the vibe of the album really well. Because of this song’s history and also being essentially a pop song we decided to let our mixer/engineer Gareth Parton have a bit of fun with it (following his argument that you can “really fuck it up” and it will still be a pop-song) with distortion, samples and other noise.
“Of Desire”: A simple song that is really based around the lyrics. It tells the story of a guy who, being in love with a girl, goes to her house under the pretense of borrowing books (this chick’s into reading) but really goes just to see the person he’s hopelessly in love with (what a dweeb, I know!). I originally just had the piano line, but Jo just started playing this hip hop beat over the top which somehow just worked. I freaken’ love hip hop beats.
“Rolling By”: The other older track on the record. I pretty much stole the ending from one of my favorite Beethoven Sonatas and thought it could end the record really nicely. Recorded clean it didn’t sound right at all. I fussed over this sound quite a bit as I knew it had to be really eerie and alien sounding if it was going to make any sense on the album. So we lumped a whole lot of effects on it and turned them up lots. Lyrically this song was written about a person close to me who having trodden the same path in their life for such a long time suddenly realized that they didn’t know where they were headed, or if they were even happy with everything in their life up until that point.
